Digital Roundup

The B-52’s, The Video Album: You’ve gotten your groove on to the music, but now’s your chance to dance this mess around while watching the videos! There are 15 videos included on this compilation, and since we know you’re wondering what they are, we won’t force you to wait another minute: you’ll get “Rock Lobster,” “Song for a Future Generation,” “Legal Tender,” “Girl from Ipanema Goes to Greenland,” “Channel Z,” “Love Shack,” “Cosmic Thing,” “Roam,” “Deadbeat Club,” “Good Stuff,” “Tell It Like It T-I-IS,” “Is That You, Mo-Dean?”, “Hot Pants Explosion,” “Revolution Earth,” and “Debbie.” It’s a full-on party in convenient video form!

Rick James, “This Magic Moment / Dance with Me”: Depending on how long your memory may be, it’s not impossible that you might remember this track from Warner Brothers’ 1989 compilation, Rock, Rhythm & Blues, which also featured covers by Elton John, Michael McDonald, Chaka Chan, Howard Hewett, Manhattan Transfer, Randy Travis, the Pointer Sisters, Christine McVie and Friends, and El Debarge. Why did this track get a single release? Say, you don’t think maybe it’s to continue with the Rick James revival we tried to start a few weeks ago by issuing his Kickin’ album at long last, do you? Yeah, that’s the ticket!

We’ve only got two artists to tackle in this week’s Digital Roundup, and one of them has nine – count ‘em – nine titles being added to our digital catalog, so before we dive into discussing those efforts, let’s talk about the lone addition from the other artist first, just to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Savatage, Fight for the Rock: It may not be the reason why it’s taken this particular entry from the band’s back catalog to make into our digital catalog, but the members of Savatage have referred to this, their third album, as Fight for the Nightmare, with lead singer John Oliva declaring outright on the band’s website, “I’ve never really been fond of that album,” only to quickly upgrade his statement to state, “We’ve never fond of that album.” It’s not hard to see why: between the album’s artwork, which found the band echoing the pose of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima, the unlikely inclusion of cover versions of Badfinger’s “Day After Day” and Free’s “Wishing Well,” the placement of a lyrically-unnecessary parental-advisory sticker on the front cover to make metal fans think there might be something outrageous contained therein, and, of course, a title track prominently featuring the word “rock,” the whole affair was clearly Atlantic Records’ attempt to break Savatage into the mainstream. Did it work? Well, the album made it onto the Billboard Top 200, if only at #158, but it was their subsequent album, Hall of the Mountain King, that proved to be the bigger seller, and it did so while delivering a collection which was far more in line with the real Savatage. Still, if you’re a fan of the band, you really need to hear Fight for the Rock, if only to confirm that rocking properly is something that’s worth a fight with your label.

Okay, now that we’ve given Fight for the Rock a fair shake, it’s on to the substantial number of additions to our catalog from our other artist of the week.

Chic & Aristofreeks, Le Freak Remixes EP: Who or what is Aristofreeks? Well, to quote directly from their SoundCloud profile, “Aristofreeks is the name of the funky beast that comprises DMC mixing championship finalist Max Martire and the internationally renowned musical chameleon Lenny Ibizarre.” If you’re questioning if these upstarts have got the goods to remix such a classic song, then you’ll be interested to learn that they’re contributing to a new single, “Everybody Get On Up,” by Next Step, a group consisting of former Chic singers Norma-Jean Wright, Luci Martin, Alfa Anderson and featuring Kathy Sledge of Sister Sledge. Hello, instant dance-floor credibility!

Various Artists, Woodstock – Music from the Original Soundtrack and More / Woodstock 2: Just in time to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the musical festival to end all music festivals – or, at the very least, the one to inspire more people than any other to claim they were there whether they actually were or not – both the original soundtrack (and more) from the original film and its sequel have been added to our digital catalog.

Foghat, The Essentials: Interested in investigating the back catalog of Foghat but feeling like our Hi-Five look into their career just isn’t in-depth enough? You’re in luck: this compilation offers just enough of an exploration of their hits and classic album tracks to provide an education without being too overwhelming.

The Unforgiven, The Unforgiven: This self-titled artifact from 1986 may be best known because one of the band’s members, Johnny Hickman, went on to team up with former Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery to form Cracker. If you can imagine a bunch of kids raised on Ennio Morricone soundtracks making roots rock…well, you probably still wouldn’t really have the sound of The Unforgiven down, since their songs also featured “gang vocals,” with everyone singing together. It’s a fun listen, though.

Eddie Harris, Live at Newport: We’re only just a few days past the 44th anniversary of the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival, which makes this the perfect week to add this album to the digital catalog, since – as you probably already figured out where we were going with this – that’s when and where it was recorded. As funky as it is jazzy, it’s a performance that may have been a little too ahead-of-the-curve for some at the time, but listening to it now, it’s clear that what Harris was really doing was trying to set a new musical standard…and succeeding, we’d argue.

Maynard Ferguson, A Message from Newport / Newport Suite: Despite its title, Maynard’s Message was not, in fact, recorded in Newport but, rather, at a performance in New York. Nor, for that matter, was Newport Suite, although that particular album does have the advantage of the song “Newport” having been premiered at the 1959 festival. Given the two album titles, it’s perhaps no surprise that they’ve been paired together in the past, but if you’re on a limited budget, we’d definitely recommend the latter, which is arguably one of the best efforts ever delivered by the legendary trumpeter.

Big Daddy, Cruisin’ Through the Rhino Years: To call Big Daddy a cover band is to come nowhere close to describing how much fun it is to hear these guys tackle tunes by everyone from Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles to Survivor and Sir Mix-a-Lot in the style of rock ‘n’ roll artists from the ‘50s and early ‘60s. Their Wikipedia page suggests that they were “among the first groups to create mash-ups,” and while that phrasing makes them sound perhaps a bit more important to music history than they really are, Big Daddy certainly has a gift for melding the sounds of two disparate artists together. Take, for instance, their complete re-recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which found them crooning “With a Little Help from My Friends” like Johnny Mathis and “A Day in the Life” like a Buddy Holly song. If you’re a longtime fan, we’ll close by letting you know that this 21-track set features the 16 songs from their previous greatest-hits collection (The Best of Big Daddy) while also adding “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Baby Got Back,” “It’s So Hard to Say I Love You,” and “Addicted to Love.”

Luka Bloom, The Platinum Collection: It’s possible that those of you who came of age listening to Christy Moore may still only see Luka Bloom as Moore’s little brother, Barry – that’s how he was billed on his first few albums, you know – but for those who were introduced to Bloom in 1990 when he burst back onto the scene bearing a new name, a big-time American record deal (Reprise), and a cracking little single called “Delirious,” they’re more likely to wonder, “So who’s this Christy Moore guy?” This compilation isn’t completely career-spanning, as Bloom’s been relatively prolific over the years, but it’s a nice sampler for those looking for a simple one-disc distillation of his career. (Plus, it includes his truly fantastic cover of LL Cool J’s “I Need Love.”)

Okay, so it’s no Oprah and Uma, but David Letterman’s notoriously awkward Oscars joke was still the first thing that came to mind when we saw that this week’s only two digital releases were Chaka Khan’s The Studio Album Collection: 1978-1992 and the third album by the San Francisco band Gamma, appropriately entitled Gamma 3. Yes, they’re decidedly disparate artists, but they’ve each got their fans, so let’s take a quick look at both efforts, just so you know what they are and if they might be something you’d find interesting.

112, Peaches & Cream – To kick off this week’s column, we’ve got the first of a few new additions to our digital catalog from the Bad Boy Entertainment archives, and this particular song remains the biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit to date from the Atlanta R&B quartet known as 112, having made it all the way to #4 back in 2001. In addition to the original version the guys did with P. Diddy, you’ll also find the radio and club mixes of the track, which feature Ludacris, as well the club mix of “Dance with Me,” which was actually a #1 hit in Belgium. (True story!)

Faith Evans,You Used to Love Me – Now’s your big chance to revisit Ms. Evans’ debut single in its original form as well as in two separate club mixes and in instrumental form. Remember how they used it to score the scene in Notorious where she catches Biggie with another woman? Good times.

Faith No More, Live at Brixton Academy – Released as the band was still riding high on the out-of-nowhere success of “Epic,” this is the 10-track UK version of the album, which means that it’s actually eight live tracks (“Falling to Pieces,” “The Real Thing,” “Epic,” “War Pigs,” “From Out of Nowhere,” “We Care a Lot,” “Zombie Eaters,” and “Edge of the World”) and two additional tracks taken from the recording sessions for The Real Thing (“The Grade” and “The Cowboy Song”).

If you’re a regular visitor to our website, then you know that we generally offer an installment of our Digital Roundup column on Wednesdays, but you’re caught us on a slow week: we’ve only got a single item joining our digital catalog. As such, we’re bypassing the column in favor of shining a solo spotlight on this item, but to our way of thinking, it more than deserves the individual attention, given that this one release actually includes 11 – count ‘em – 11 albums.